Earlier this week, Codexis Inc. filed for a $100 million initial public offering on Nasdaq. The short press release is here and we’ve uploaded the entire 841-page file for your reading pleasure here.

Codexis, as you may recall, is a San Francisco-based company developing the microbes to chew up plants and turn them into sugars, which are then turned into ethanol and diesel. Shell owns a 20% stake in the company and is pumping about $15 million a quarter into research and development. It filed for an IPO before, but then pulled back in September 2008 citing “current public market conditions.”

That was good timing. Two weeks later, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. Within three weeks, American International Group was bailed out and Bank of America had bought Merrill Lynch.

An alternative energy, U.S.-listed IPO is something of a novelty. The last biofuels IPO was …

The idea of tinkering with the earth’s climate to keep temperatures down—whether that means seeding clouds, spraying particles into the atmosphere, or building huge sunshades—already had appeal in certain circles. Bjorn Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus—no relation to the star-crossed climate conference—recently gave a hearty thumbs-up to the idea of making clouds whiter to reflect more sunshine, for instance.

For some folks leery of the whole idea of curbing greenhouse-gas emissions, geo-engineering offers a seemingly attractive techno-fix—and a cheaper one, too boot. You might recall a recent dustup involving geo-engineering and a pair of best-selling authors. Lou Grinzo even wonders if Chinese reticence at Copenhagen might not have something to do with the idea of becoming a big player in geo-engineering in a decade or two when the world urgently needs a quick fix.

The big question is: Will climate engineering get more appealing the less progress is actually made at cutting greenhouse-gas emissions? Copenhagen certainly lowered the bar for global action on emissions…

China makes another move to ensure energy supplies, signing a deal with Venezuela to help develop offshore oil fields, in the WSJ. With Iraqi elections looming, the country has another chance to put its oil wealth at the service of its citizens, writes a former oil minister in the WSJ.

Who was really to blame for the meltdown in Copenhagen? China, without a doubt, says Mark Lynas in an insider’s account of how Beijing sabotaged the climate summit, in The Guardian: “The truth is this: China wrecked the talks, intentionally humiliated Barack Obama, and insisted on an awful ‘deal’ so western leaders would walk away carrying the blame.”

In any event, the Copenhagen Accord is coming under increasing fire, with the very developing countries who helped draft it now criticizing the agreement, in the FT.

Don’t laugh—the idea has some currency in Canada. Homer’s bumbling nature—you’ve seen him at work inside the Springfield nuclear power plant—simply reinforces public worries about the safety of nuclear power. Mr. Burns doesn’t much help the industry’s image. Three-eyed fish don’t help, either. And Lisa Simpson’s eco-activism is the icing on the cake.

That’s from philosophy professor Bill Irwin, who’s been making the rounds on Canadian radio in the wake of the decision by the province of Saskatchewan to nix plans for a new nuclear reactor. Dr. Irwin wrote “The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D’oh! of Homer,” one of his several books on the confluence of TV and philosophy. (Wait for Tony Soprano on cap-and-trade.)

The idea that the Simpsons could influence public attitudes toward nuclear energy isn’t so far-fetched: As much as we harp on mundane issues such as economics, lead times, supply chains, and the waste issue, it’s entirely possible that Homer has a bigger audience than MIT reports…

Here’s the thing about OPEC’s decision to maintain current levels of crude-oil production today: It really amounts to a production cut, but the market doesn’t care.

The oil cartel for the fourth time this year maintained current production levels, pretty much as everyone expected. With one big caveat: OPEC honchos called for oil-producing states to comply with their output quotas after an alarming lack of discipline since the spring.

OPEC Secretary General Abdalla Salem el-Badri called for oil producers to get back to a 75% level of compliance, the WSJ reports. Saudi Arabian Oil Minister Ali Al Naimi went further, introducing the novel idea of 100% compliance with agreed-upon production cuts.

They aren’t really trifling figures. Getting back to 75% compliance would mean taking about 1 million barrels per day off the world market, right as China and Japan are getting back on the oil wagon…

Crude oil futures slipped toward $73 a barrel after OPEC, as expected, maintained current oil-production levels. Of course, that should mean a cut—the cartel really wants members to start complying with their output quotas, both in the WSJ.

The blame game for Copenhagen gets started in earnest—and it ain’t China’s fault. George Monbiot goes off the reservation and slams Barack Obama, invokes Iraq war lessons, and hears the orchestra on the Titanic. Naomi Klein gets in the same groove: “There are very few US presidents who have squandered as many once-in-a-generation opportunities as Obama,” both in The Guardian.

More Copenhagen post-mortems: Eric Pooley explains why rush-hour climate diplomacy didn’t work in Copenhagen (“Imagine that a Department of Motor Vehicles office joined forces with an Alitalia ticket counter and set out to save the world”) and won’t work in Washington, in Bloomberg.

President Barack Obama put in 13-hours of negotiations and appears to have saved the Copenhagen climate talks from utter collapse with his last-minute push. But is George W. Bush the real victor?

One of the early and overwhelming conclusions in the wake of the “Copenhagen Accord” is that the United Nations process for reaching agreement on climate change is broken. Take this, for example, from Newsweek: “The best chance of reining in emissions of greenhouse gases and avoiding dangerous climate change is to stamp a big green R.I.P. over the sprawling United Nations process that the Copenhagen talks were part of.”

The goal of giving every country, big and small, equal say in crucial issues and the need for unanimous consent led to countries such as Sudan and Tuvalu playing an outsize role in global negotiations. British climate secretary Ed Miliband called the two-week process a “farce,” and called for a reform of the UN process, saying “We cannot again allow negotiations on real points of substance to be hijacked in this way.”

Indeed, it’s not clear whether the summit’s conclusion underscores the need to ditch the existing UN framework or whether that framework has already been scuttled.

Thanks to the opposition of a handful of countries—luminaries of international cooperation such as Bolivia, Venezuela, Sudan, and Cuba—the conference ended not with a formal agreement but simply by “taking note” of the 3-page climate accord. Which, in diplomatic language, means pretty much what it means when you tell your mother-in-law you’ll “take note” of her suggestions.

Pundits everywhere are passing judgment on the climate-change deal reached in Copenhagen early Saturday. The market is too—and it isn’t mincing words.

Prices for carbon-emission permits in Europe are tanking on Monday, with a fall of nearly 10%, the biggest decline in almost a year. That’s a pretty clear sign that whatever the other merits of the “Copenhagen Accord,” it does nothing to actually tighten limits on greenhouse-gas emissions. More here, here, and here.

For all the Monday morning quarterbacking on the political implications of the last-minute deal in Copenhagen (more on that later), money talks. And it isn’t happy. Businesses wasted no time expressing their concern with the watered-down agreement reached in Denmark.

Basically, lots of businesses—from banks to power-equipment makers to those who brew advanced biofuels–wanted clear rules on just how and when the clean-energy future is to be built. They didn’t get it. Take this reaction, reported in today’s The Wall Street Journal…

About Environmental Capital

Environmental Capital provides daily news and analysis of the shifting energy and environmental landscape. The Wall Street Journal’s Keith Johnson is the lead writer. Environmental Capital is led by Journal energy reporter Russell Gold, and includes contributions from other writers at the Journal, WSJ.com, and Dow Jones Newswires. Write us at environmentalcapital@wsj.com.